Chapter Four:
Nobody Breaks Into a Car for Nothing
Rafferty’s report came in at seven, and it was mostly nothing, which I don’t trust either.
I hired him three days ago. Ex-police, quiet, the kind of man who eats lunch in his car and notices everything. He put a single sheet on my desk and stood there while I read it.
Tessa Harley had a standing appointment. First Thursday of every month, she took a cab alone to a private address in Fairhaven, forty minutes out, stayed about ninety minutes, and came home. No driver, no phone calls before or after. Rafferty had followed her twice. He couldn’t see who she visited without walking up to the door.
“Lover?” I said.
“Could be. Could be a lawyer she doesn’t want you knowing about. Could be somebody who’s blackmailing her.” He shrugged. “She goes in with a tote bag and comes out with the same tote bag.”
“Keep on it.”
“Yes, sir.”
When he left I sat looking at the word Fairhaven for longer than was healthy. A widow with a secret standing appointment, three weeks after her husband’s funeral, who then walks into my office and proposes. I’m not a romantic man. It didn’t look like grief to me. It looked like logistics.
Except the badge log. Ines had been very clear about the badge log, and I’d said odd out loud in front of Tessa, which I still resented.
I asked Marcus about Halloran Freight over coffee, casual, like I was asking about the weather.
“Never heard of it,” he said. Then, a half-second later, “Old freight outfit, isn’t it? Dissolved in the nineties?”
“Where’d you get that?”
“You just said it.” He smiled. “Your face said it, anyway. Why?”
“It’s in the recitals of Harley’s supply guarantee. Tessa spotted it.”
“Of course she did.” He stirred his coffee. “Did she say anything else about it?”
I looked up. It was a lawyer’s question, a careful one, the kind he asked a hundred times a week. I told myself that. “No. Should she have?”
“Just being thorough.” He waved a hand. “Leave it, Raphael. Dead companies have dead files. You’ve got a merger to close.”
I left it. For about six hours.
My mother still holds dinner on Sundays, which means the rest of us hold it on Wednesdays because she’s decided Sundays are for church and Wednesdays are for people who love her enough to show up. Vivian Kessler is seventy-one and could stare down a bank.
“Halloran,” I said, over dessert.
She set her spoon down very precisely.
“Where did you hear that name?”
“A filing. Harley Meridian formed out of its dissolution. It looked like a joint venture.”
“It was your father’s business before you were born. A long time ago.” She dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “It closed. It didn’t go well. Your father didn’t like talking about it and neither do I.”
“Mother.”
“Is the girl pretty?”
“What?”
“The widow. Celeste says you’re marrying her. She said it like it was a funeral.”
“It’s a contract.”
“Everything’s a contract with you.” She picked her spoon up again. “Eat your pudding.”
And that was that. In thirty-eight years I had never once seen my mother change a subject so quickly, and in thirty-eight years I’d never had a reason to notice.
Tessa called me at ten-fifteen the next morning. Not a text. A call.
“My car,” she said. “In your garage. Somebody broke in.”
I was at the garage in six minutes.
She stood beside it with her arms folded, hair coming loose, a security guard hovering at a respectful distance. It was a battered grey Corolla she’d kept from before Graham, parked on the visitor level since Tuesday, and the driver’s window was gone, glass scattered across the seat. Laptop still on the back seat. Wallet still in the glovebox. Radio still in the dash.
“What did they take?” I said.
“The folder.”
“The evidence folder.”
“My copies. The badge logs, the pharmacy record, the trust amendment.” She kept her voice level, but I saw her thumbnail digging into her sleeve. “I had them in the glovebox because I didn’t want them in the apartment.”
“Who knew they were there?”
“You, Ines. Me.”
“Marcus?”
“I never showed Marcus anything.”
“I gave him a summary.”
“Then you told him where they were.”
“I didn’t say where they were.” I turned to the guard. “Cameras.”
“Down for maintenance, Mr. Kessler. Since six last night. The system flagged a scheduled outage.”
I felt something cold slide down my spine that had nothing to do with her. “Scheduled by whom?”
“I’d have to check.”
“Check.”
He went. Tessa was looking at me with an odd expression, the kind you give something you’re not sure is a compliment.
“That was your first question,” she said quietly. “‘What did they take.’ Not ‘are you okay.'”
“You’re standing up. You’re arguing with me. I assumed you were fine.”
“I am fine.”
“Then I asked the right question.”
Her mouth twitched, tired, almost a smile, and then it died. “Was that a joke?”
“I don’t know.” I honestly didn’t.
I looked at the car and made myself think it through, cold, like a deal. Somebody had disabled my building’s cameras and gone straight to a specific car in a specific spot for a specific folder. That meant they knew her, knew where she’d stashed it, and had access to my garage system. That wasn’t a threat to her. It was a threat to me, and the merger, and the security of a tower I’d spent nine years building.
Or she’d staged it. Broken her own window, tossed her own folder, called me first thing. It was cheap and clever, and it got her sympathy at the exact moment I was deciding whether to believe her.
I hated that I couldn’t rule it out.
“I’m moving your car to the executive level,” I said. “Security gets a new access log. Nobody touches the Halloran file except you, Ines and me.”
“That’s protective.”
“It’s business. If someone inside my building did this, I need to know who.” I said it clearly, so she’d have no room to misread it. “I’m not doing it for you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“Good.”
She stared at me a second longer than she needed to. Then she nodded, once, and picked a piece of glass out of her hair.
“They didn’t take the laptop,” she said. “They didn’t take the wallet. They only wanted the paper. Which means they already knew what was in it.”
I’d been thinking the same thing and hated hearing it in her voice.
That evening I sat alone in my office with Rafferty’s sheet and Marcus’s easy question and my mother’s spoon, and I tried to make them into one picture. They wouldn’t.
Did she say anything else about it?
Just being thorough.
I turned the sheet face down, and I didn’t like that either.
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